In Any Case It Glows

Gloriole
is an archaic word

for halo.

And not
glory hole

its debauched
false cognate.

In any case,

the thing glows.

Wreckage of the Sun

I watched this kid grow up, and then he died, and then a storm rolled in.
There is nothing you can tell me about the weather that I’ll believe,
unless you learned it from a Gothic romance novel.

I am in this storm right now: I can feel the thunder’s reverberating
remonstrations like a You took too much in the bloodstream.
When the boy becomes a man we celebrate, embrace him, punch his

shoulders lightly, tell him how proud. We remind him that we knew him
when. When his feet and hands were like untrained Saint
Bernards, his powers of calculation clumsy, each of his enthusiasms

and predilections subjugating the whole of his heart, immense.
The thunder shakes the world like it’s a sentence I cannot
read. This could mean anything. The words and letters bleed.

When the sun inevitably returns on the scene like an alien renaissance
there will be nothing to report. I watched this kid grow up into
the kind of man I hoped he’d be, which like this summer storm was not

good enough to change a thing, to stop those interminable moribund birds,
tough as nails, from shrilling on as though the rain had never come,
as though there is any news left on this earth that I would want to sing about.

Dakota Tavern Toilets

Is the girl second-
coating her lips on in the
can the same girl whose

piss now primes the backs of my
legs? The sodden night awaits.